Jean Lievens: Rachel Botsman – How We Treat People Will Craft Our World – Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy

Rachel Botsman advocated the advantage of reputation capital at Wired Money in London yesterday. She noted that an economy based on reputation is incredibly empowering, and will take us away from a financial world “based largely on faceless transactions and moving us to an age built on humanness that we [have] lost.” The reputation economy has already begun to take effect—Airbnb user Kate Kendall used Airbnb reviews to secure an apartment lease.

Rachel Botsman

A reputation-based system will take time to establish, but has the potential to revolutionize the financial sector. This type of credibility adds “context, cause and character” to currently anonymous transactions. “How we treat people and how we behave will ultimately drive our world,” Botsman says.

Phi Beta Iota: This is not a new idea — a Nobel was awarded for the economist that demonstrated that trust lowers the cost of doing business, and the idea of reputation and congitive filter templates as future currency was discussed at (Silicon Valley) Hackers Conference in 1994. Robert Garigue (RIP) built his entire 21st Century Network Enabled Capability architecture around trust as the deliverable instead of security in archaic terms. Peer to Peer as nurtured by Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation is ground zero for all of this. Where Botsman excels is at articulating the power of technology to create trust among humans.